Sun Valley 1936: The Railroad That Invented American Skiing

In the summer of nineteen thirty-five, Averell Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, had a problem. His railroad's sleeper cars ran west from Chicago and Kansas City and terminated on the Pacific Coast, and in the winter months they ran nearly empty. He needed a reason for people to go west in December and January and February, a destination that would justify a train ticket and a Pullman berth.

His solution was an Austrian count named Felix Schaffgotsch, whom he dispatched across the American West with instructions to find terrain that matched or exceeded the best ski country in Europe, specifically somewhere Union Pacific trains could reach. Schaffgotsch spent months in the mountains of Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington before a local rancher pointed him toward a sheep-grazing valley in the foothills of Idaho's Sawtooth Range. Schaffgotsch cabled Harriman: "It contained more delightful features than any other place I have seen in the United States, Switzerland, or Austria."

By December twenty-first, nineteen thirty-six, Sun Valley Lodge was open. The building was poured concrete styled to look like Austrian stucco. The chairlift that served Proctor Mountain was the first ski chairlift in the world, its mechanism copied from a banana-loading conveyor that Union Pacific engineers had observed at a Central American port. Harriman's publicity team arranged for celebrities, including Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert, to arrive by Union Pacific train and be photographed on the slopes.

Ernest Hemingway arrived in the fall of nineteen thirty-nine and stayed. The resort that exists to sell train tickets had become a genuine destination. The sport of Alpine skiing in America, as most people practice it today, grew largely from this valley, this railroad's balance sheet, and one Austrian count's letter home.